Budapest : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Astonishingly moving, intricate work...
Review: ...unlike a lot of musicians, whose attempt at fiction comes off as stilted and short-sighted, Buarque turns out to be a great, tersely effective novelist. This, his third book, is a short-but-dense meditation on the parallels and interplay of love and language. The narrator, a ghost-writer named Jose Costa, first becomes infatuated with a foreign tongue, than a foreign tongue attached to a foreign girl. While his career peaks, he abandons his wife and fat child to surrender to the Hungarian language and his new teacher...this is only the beginning: Buarque packs a lot into 183 pages, and the two plots (the language and the ghost-writing career) intersect masterfully, leading to a miraculously antipodean conclusion that is neither uplifting nor depressing, just ingeniously circular. Bittersweet to beat the band, unnervingly precise, and immensley poignant, BUDAPEST is also granted with a great translation job from the original Portugese into English.

Rating:
Summary: "I'm an amateur", "yet somehow I manage to get away with it"
Review: José Costa is a Brazilian with a rather unusual job: he is a ghost writer. Mainly that means that he writes a book and gets paid for doing so, while someone else receives the credit for the job. Costa is married to a successful journalist, and has a son. He is neither terribly happy nor horribly unhappy, but he wants to change his routine. That is probably the reason why he accepts the invitation to the Anonymous Writers' Convention to be held at Istanbul. Costa goes there, and has a wonderful time, but something life-changing happens to him when his airplane somehow gets stranded in Budapest (Hungary) during his returning trip to Rio de Janeiro. He hears the Hungarian language, and feels the need to learn it, to understand what makes it so poetic...

Unfortunately that isn't possible, and Costa has to return to Brazil, to his family and to his job. But he won't be able to forget his ardent wish to learn Hungarian, and will even mutter some of it in his sleep. Soon enough, José Costa knows that he is a man with a mission: he must return to Budapest and learn Hungarian, "rumoured to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects.". In that trip and in others that will come, Costa will find the meaning of Hungarian, of languages, and of words, and will rediscover the magic of his own language by forbidding himself to speak it for a long time ("Perhaps it was possible to replace one language with another in my head, little by little, discarding a word for every word acquired. For a time, my head would be like a house undergoing renovations, with new words being hoisted up through one ear and the rubble being lowered down through the other"). There will be another woman, and another boy, a possible family so similar to his own... All that, in Budapest, the yellow city in Hungary that will compete with Brazil and Rio de Janeiro for Costa's allegiance. Some questions stand out so much that even the reader will have to find an answer of his own. For instance, are we necessarily born into a language, or can we adopt the one that pleases us most?.

"Budapest" is a strange book, somehow confusing at times, but also deeply engaging. The reader will be interested in Costa's life as he travels once and again between Rio de Janeiro and Budapest, but also on the many reflections on the nature of words, language, life, anonymity and fame that appear in this book. Of course, the author of "Budapest" is as peculiar as the book itself. Chico Buarque is a famous Brazilian artist, better known for his music than for his books. Notoriously press-shy, he might even see himself as a kind of José Costa, someone who wants to write just for the sake of it, not needing fame to be happy.

Chico wrote this book without having visited Budapest, merely with the help of a dictionary and a tourist guide of that city. Disregarding that, the results were wonderful, something the reader will be able to appreciate even in "Budapest"'s translation to English. This translation cannot help but lose some of the charm that is intrinsic to the Portuguese language, despite being very good. All the same, it is as good as one can be, due to the fact that Buarque worked alongside the translator who did it, in order to help when some things had to be rewritten because "They did not translate".

"I'm an amateur" said Chico Buarque in an interview about "Budapest". "It's the same with songs. I'm not a professional. Yet somehow I manage to get away with it". I think that in this case, as in many other occasions, Buarque is being overly modest. This book is well-worth reading, because it has an interesting plot and a great development of it. Those are the reasons why I recommend it to you :)

Belen Alcat